Highlands First Gourmet Restaurant

Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: August - 2022

Mid-century, c. 1945,Highlands’ very firstgourmet restaurant,The Tarheel, opened and quicklybecame a popular dining destina-tion. It was painted bright blueand white. The owner, Bill Way,was an alum of the Universityof North Carolina, home of theblue-and-white Tarheels.*Way’s wife, Day, oversaw thekitchen. She was a grand cook.Her mother was from Germany,so she was raised on continentalfare, foods like shrimp cocktail,sauerbraten, and such. Townsfolkfound it a refreshing change fromthe accustomed regional fare.To expand the restaurant services,Day got permission from theForest Service to open a conces-sion at Dry Falls. Tony (Isabel’sfuture husband) and Bud, Isabel’sbrother, ran the stand.But there were a couple of hiccupsin their plan – one, since therewas no heat, refrigeration, orlockable storage at the falls, thecrackers, candy, peanuts, softdrinks, etc. had to be hauleddown to the stand every morning,then packed up at day’s end andreturned to The Tarheel. Thesecond problem: neither boy hada driver’s license, so they had totalk Isabel into chauffeuring themdown and back every day.On an afternoon when customerswere scarce, Bud got bored and,without permission, decidedto paint great big eyes peekingout from under the eaves of thestate-owned building. On the sideof the structure, he wrote: “Lookwhat we’ve got!” Bud was very proud of his work,and it could have been goodadvertising – but he’d neglectedto clear it with the Forest Servicebefore he started slapping paint onthe wall.It wasn’t long before Bud was sum-moned by the Forest Service fora dressing down. As punishment,the three of them had to paint overBud’s handiwork.At summer’s end their employmentand all it taught them (e.g., don’tpaint eyeballs on public buildings)ended, and back to school theywent. The Tarheel closed as Billwas needed more by Uncle Sam in’45 than Highlands.But to this day, if you stop by DryFalls and take a good, hard lookat the building, you can still seea huge pair of eyes gawking backat you.And, by the way, Dry Falls,Van Hook Campgrounds, andCliffside were all constructionsof the Civilian ConservationCorps (CCC), a project created byPresident Franklin Roosevelt tokeep young men working duringhard times. As a relatively recentinstallation, one can understandwhy painting eyeballs on the newbuilding was, poetically-speakinganyway, a bit of a federal offense.*North Carolina’s pine forestssupplied tar and turpentine forAmerica and foreign exports.Distilling it was hard, messy labor,however. Workers walking in thespillage wound up with a foreversticky, black goo all over theirankles. They were recognizedby folks near and far as Tarheels,and that stuck, as it were, to allresidents of North Carolina.

As told to Donna Rhodes by local historian Isabel Chambers